{"id":12715,"date":"2018-06-20T00:58:00","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T00:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=12715"},"modified":"2018-06-20T00:58:00","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T00:58:00","slug":"from-medical-journalist-to-health-care-ceo-the-atul-gawande-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2018\/06\/20\/from-medical-journalist-to-health-care-ceo-the-atul-gawande-story\/","title":{"rendered":"From medical journalist to health-care CEO\u2014the Atul Gawande story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One day you’re a staff writer at New Yorker<\/em> magazine and the next day you’re the CEO of a health-care startup backed by Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and JP Morgan Chase. A fever dream? Not if you’re Atul Gawande. Of course, Gawande is no ordinary writer. He is also a surgeon who practices at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, and a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as well as the author of four books about medicine. His TED talk<\/a> on how to fix modern medicine has 1.8 million views. He won a McArthur “Genius” grant in 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gawande also has an interesting history with Buffett’s investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, one of the backers of the new medical startup (which doesn’t have a name yet). After he wrote an article<\/a> for the New Yorker<\/em> in 2009 about a Texas town with one of the highest rates of medical spending in the country\u2014a piece that was cited by then-president Barack Obama during his fight to restructure Medicare\u2014Gawande received a check for $20,000<\/a> from Buffett’s longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, in thanks for his perceptive writing (Gawande donated the money to Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dream big, health care reporters.https:\/\/t.co\/Z3TsGgMCfX<\/a><\/p>— Alex Wayne (@aawayne) June 20, 2018<\/a><\/blockquote>